To pull or not to pull - Valonia

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by lastlight

if you have even one bubble of the stuff i'm convinced you've got it forever now based on my passed experiences. but yeah go head remove it in one piece then throw it at a wall it's fun =)

+1. You've tried to be careful, but studies have shown that 70% of people with Valonia got it from a fellow reefer, frag, or rock who had no signs or symptoms of infection. So remember, it doesn't matter whether you can see any signs of the bubbles, you can still spread Valonia at any time.

If you can see one, you've got dozens more you either can't see, or haven't grown large enough to see yet. Thankfully, of all the nuisance algaes, it's probably the prettiest (their surfaces refract light in the same way as star sapphires) and least problematic for corals. The old ones will often get covered in coralline algae. In my tank I've watched at least half a dozen of them get completely encrusted over by fast growing montipora, to the point where they become little more than slight bumps in the surface of the coral.